What's this column?

In this column, you see how a line in the modern edition appears in the First Folio. If there is no corresponding line shown, this is because the modern editor has introduced text from an early Quarto version.

The First Folio did not contain the following plays, so these are shown in their Quarto printing (dates in parentheses): King Edward III (1596), Pericles (1609), Two Noble Kinsmen (1634). Similarly, all poems are shown with their Quarto text alongside: Venus and Adonis (1593), The Rape of Lucrece (1594), The Passionate Pilgrim (1599), The Phoenix and the Turtle (1601), Sonnets (1609), A Lover's Complaint (1609).

We retain the spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and italicization of the original. If a line in the modern text takes up more than one line in the early edition, we show the line break by /. We range all text to the left. We do not show cases where the typesetters have dealt with an extra-long line by putting the last word on the next line, preceded by a (, as we do not have a constraint on line length.

To see the early text of an Act without any emendation, click on the symbol.